WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Fast Color, in theaters now.
Julia Hart's Fast Color focuses on Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a homeless woman roaming the future American Midwest, trying to find solitude because of her ability to inadvertently trigger huge earthquakes. As we learn more of her story, we discover Ruth's running from a very tragic past, which appears to be the catalyst for her abilities going haywire.
When Hart finally raises the curtain to reveal what made Ruth so unstable, it ends up being one of the indie flick's darkest and most heartbreaking moments.
Throughout the film, we glimpse snippets of Ruth's restless past as she wanders the dusty landscape, one where rain has mysteriously stopped falling over the American plains. She eventually makes her way back to her mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) and estranged daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney). Here, a lot more of Ruth's personal tapestry is woven back together for the audience.
As her mom grouses over her lack of maturity, we learn of Ruth's rebellious history as a teen, all due to Bo being overprotective and the girl trying way too hard to appease a mother who's in full control of her own powers (the ability to alter matter). We're eventually privy to the backstory of how a frustrated Ruth ran away to live a life of decadence, becoming a promiscuous junkie only to then return home, repentant and pregnant in her teenage years.
All these moments tip the scale and hint that Ruth's wayward mindset triggered the breakdown of these powers, which she was notably able to control as a youth. But when Lila presses her mom for the reasons why she ran away from them and started accidentally activating massive quakes as a drifter, destroying landscapes around her to the point she became a government fugitive, we find out Ruth's psyche got fractured after she nearly killed Lila as a baby.
In a flashback, we see Ruth had a seizure that broke the pipes in her room and flooded it. She woke up minutes later, almost too late, and had to swim underwater to find the child, who was only a few months old. Ruth resuscitated the girl, but then and there she and Bo realized that her ability to manipulate Earth's tectonic plates, and the planet's overall energy, was more of a curse than a gift.
It's quite jarring, going from being kept in the dark to jolted into such a shocking history. The twist does catch the audience off guard, as we're expecting the turning point to be due to PTSD from Ruth's well-documented addiction, not knowing who her child's father is or simply from that turbulent relationship with Bo, which permeates every moment of the movie.
But this seismic shift with her nearly submerging Lila to the point of no return is super unexpected and totally explains why Ruth lost it mentally. It's a very emotionally heavy scene, but one that perfectly details why the young mother became unstable in the wake of such unspeakable trauma, and the struggles that ensued.
Directed by Julia Hart, Fast Color is in theaters now. It stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ruth, Lorraine Toussaint as Bo, Saniyya Sidney as Lila, Ruth’s daughter, Christopher Denham as Bill, David Strathairn as Ellis and Levi Dylan Martinez as Henry.